


the mind is a tricky creature

by tincanspaceship



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Anxiety, Character Study, Established Relationship, F/F, Femslash February 2020, POV Second Person, just some space lesbians bein cute and having existential crises
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-09
Updated: 2020-02-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:40:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22632835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tincanspaceship/pseuds/tincanspaceship
Summary: the mirror lies,they told you.your mind lies. you will think you are not yourself. don’t be scared.i am scared, you said, but you spoke too quietly and their ears were too muffled for them to hear.
Relationships: Ezri Dax/Tora Ziyal
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9





	the mind is a tricky creature

_ the mirror lies _ , they told you.  _ your mind lies. you will think you are not yourself. don’t be scared.  _

_ i am scared,  _ you said, but you spoke too quietly and their ears were too muffled for them to hear. you felt like a child again, swarmed by a sea of giants, hoping that you can catch the attention of just one of them. 

you are always scared. 

the mind does lie, and you think you should see the face of an Olympic gymnast in the mirror. for a moment, you do, but then the haze clears and you see nothing but a tired husk of a sham of a being. 

a shell of a promising young woman. 

you were always the promising one.  _ what a smart girl _ , they said,  _ such a future ahead of her.  _ you would do badly, and you would sit in red-hot shame with your face an ugly, red, watery mess as you watched your mother pick apart your assignments in red pen, and then you learned not to fail.  _ what promise she has _ , they would say, not realizing you hadn’t done anything of meaning. 

_ oh, are you sure you don’t want to be joined _ ? they would say, once you were old enough to voice your opinion, however quietly.  _ you would be the perfect candidate! _

candidates must be healthy, and you weren’t. you were (are) sick.  _ can’t you see?  _ you wanted to say.  _ i hurt. i am sick and i am scared and i am hurt and i just want this sick to let go of me.  _

_ that’s very nice of you to say _ , is what you said. 

you were scared of it. not just scared, like you were (are) of everything, but petrified, terrified to your core of the idea of having more voices in your head.

you put your hand over your stomach and feel the symbiote squirm. 

you never quite fit anywhere. you love your brothers but they never related to you. your classmates were sorted amongst themselves into the best and worst candidates for joining, and you didn’t (don’t) want to be joined, and that hierarchy never had room for you. you are too quiet to make friends. it seems so easy for other people, so effortless to find a companion. it was (is) never easy for you. a long list of rules you were never taught, too busy with your fleeting, discarded interests. your childhood was a long, solitary ordeal, and the rest of your life has been much the same. 

except for the half-bajoran, half-cardassian young woman who you met again for the first time while she lay in a hospital bed, healing from the bolt that had struck her in the chest. 

_ i'm dax,  _ you said, and she looked paper-fragile,  _ ezri dax.  _

_ hello, ezri,  _ she croaked,  _ i'm ziyal.  _

neither of you had ever fit. ziyal, a hybrid, discussed with disdain, whose grey skin discarded her from bajoran circles and whose nose discarded her from cardassian society. even her biology was a web of contradictions and excess, conflicting systems. 

she liked you, because you brought in her watercolours and her paper and sat with her as she painted.

you didn't know much about ziyal, but you learned. when she was little, she said, she would try and cover the grey tint of her skin with makeup, and sculpt the cardassian ridges of her forehead into something more benign. later, when that didn’t work, she began wearing a bajoran veil of mourning. later still, she tried to scratch away her skin under her hands. her mother had stopped her, of course, but the damage was done, and she didn’t sit still long enough under the dermal regenerator to get rid of the faint raised scar down her neck. 

_ i was scared of myself, ezri _ , she murmured.  _ but now i refuse to be. i have committed no crime. i do not control my heritage.  _

she, when abandoned at the breen camp, found herself bedridden without her cocktail of medications to keep her body from falling apart. she was not in attendance at her mother’s funeral, too ill to do anything but remain stock-still on the pitiful excuse for a bed. that was her biggest regret, she told you.

_ i lost years of my life there. i don’t want to spend another second recovering _ , she said, after her most frustrating setback. 

you understood (understand), because your late teenage years were a swirl of unmedicated misery and attempts to drag your petulant brain to pay attention, and if someone asked you to say anything that happened in that time frame, you don’t think you could answer. 

ziyal recovered slowly and shakily. you took her to the holodeck once she was able to leave sickbay in a wheelchair, and you both sat in the cardassian sauna, enjoying your new freedom, and she talked to you about how much she missed the heat and the warmth and the steam until quark evicted you for running ten minutes overtime. 

you took her for dinner. she laughed at her comical inability to hold a spoon steady, so you fetched her a straw, and you both laughed at her drinking bajoran broth from the bowl. she smiled with all her teeth, and you fell in love. 

you talked with keiko and grew blooming pink earth peonies and bajoran lilacs and dusty green andorian fern, gave them to ziyal, and in return she painted them for you, and in return you bought sheets of traditionally crafted paper from a bajoran artisan, and in return she went swimming with you at the trill baths, and in return you offered to share a room with her so you could call if there was a medical emergency, and in return she took you out to vic’s and you went dancing as best you could, and in return you kissed her, and in return she kissed you. 

now, her hypos and gel supplements and pills are organized into neat sections next to your solitary bottle of anti-anxiety medication, standing like a lone soldier in the bottom right corner of the bathroom drawer under the sink.

it is strange, to have the debris of someone else’s life around you. ziyal’s studio is where the kitchen would be, if either of you really minded the difference between replicated and non-replicated food. her candles and prayer disc are on the dresser, sitting on top of a traditional cardassian scarf. her small pot of blue makeup, a precious gift from garak, is open on the rim of the sink. her dresses hang next to your uniforms, her socks are nestled next to yours, your shirts have coagulated into one pile you both wear. the cleaning agents are next to the knee braces. her crutches lean against your bookshelf, and her salve for the dry, scaly parts of her skin rests next to torias’s diary. there’s an open medkit on the coffee table, next to your work padds and her acrylics.

ziyal sneaks up on you. she rests her head on your shoulder, her hands around your stomach. you clasp your hands around hers, and when she patiently asks you to  _ come to bed, ezri, it’s late _ , you aren’t compelled to disobey. you brush your teeth with ziyal still wrapped around you, her grip light but her weight against you. you half-carry her back to bed, because her legs nearly buckle again. 

she crawls into the nest of your heavy white duvet and thick quilts, inviting you in beside her, and you take the offer, falling into the all-consuming warmth of the mattress. ziyal is the picture of content, her hair ruffled underneath her, eyes barely open and smiling slightly as she reaches for you. 

you shuffle into her, her head on your chest and her arm around your waist, and you ignore the other voices in your head as you drift off thinking about just how lucky you are. 

  
  
  



End file.
